Buzzsumo, one of the best content marketing tools that allows you to find the most shared content and key influencers within your industry, has this week released a new tool called SumoRank. The tools is aimed at community managers wanting to assess the interaction rates of their company’s Facebook page and find out the best days and times to post.

SumoRank is quick to get started with and offers a more user-friendly and visually appealing interface than Facebook’s own ‘Insights’ tab. Admittedly much of the data that SumoRank gives you can be gleaned from ‘Insights’, but SumoRank does a lot of the work for you, telling you straight up what your most popular time to post is and your most popular day of the week for interactions.

As we’ll see, SumoRank also enables you to benchmark against competitors or review industry trends such as the current decline in Facebook interactions.

Optimise your posts

All this data is perfect for finding out what works well on your page and what isn’t going down as well as you might have thought. Figures for average engagement by post type may prove or disprove your hypothesis that your audience prefer images to links – looking around different pages has shown me this does actually vary considerably between page, it isn’t the cases that one type is consistently top. Figures for average engagement per character range will also help you establish where posts over 300 characters are good or bad for engaging your audience. Again there is considerable variety here. For Smart Insights, we saw posts with over 300 characters perform considerably better than ones with less characters (except for ones with less than 50), and yet other Facebook pages see their engagement decline rapidly as their posts get longer. It depends on the type of content your audience is looking to consume.

The data it gives on engagement by day posted can again be gleaned from ‘Insights’, but SumoRank presents it in a more accessible way.

If you don’t post frequently at the weekend but are seeing high engagement rates then it might be worth stepping this up somewhat.

The data on engagement by time posted may be somewhat more useful for community managers. If you see a spike during lunchtime hours you might want to time your posts to go out then, whilst similarly if you get good engagements rates well into the evening but never post then you could be missing a trick.

Spy on the competition

The really neat thing about SumoRank is that you can look into the results of almost any Facebook page (They don’t have data for very small Facebook pages), which mean you can get all the engagement stats of the competition. If your competition is doing particularly well you could well learn some lessons from them, as what appeals to their audience may well go down well with yours as well given that you will be targeting the same demographic. An interesting trend I’ve noticed when researching the tool and looking at a lot of Facebook pages engagement stats is that almost every single page has seen it’s engagement rate fall considerably since March this year. This reflects the deliberate reduction in organic page reach by Facebook over this period, which is part of Facebook’s efforts to force brands to pay to boost their posts and make the platform ‘pay to play’.

If you are involved in the running of your brand’s Facebook page, or just want to see how the competition measure up, you can access SumoRank here.